Often progress bars are used to measure the progress of a given activity. An example of a commonly measured activity is the progress of a download from the Internet. A user device, such as a set-top-box (STB) or a computer, may connect to the internet, via an internet connection, to download data from a remote location to a local storage device such as an internal hard drive or other type of memory for local use. Various methods exist for transferring or downloading data from one device to another. File sharing is an example of transferring large amounts of data across the internet. Email allows data files to be transferred from one user's system to another. Data can be uploaded to a website or file transfer protocol (FTP) server for download.
As data is received by the recipient device typically a progress meter, or more commonly a progress bar, is used to indicate the amount of data received. Often the progress bar will output this information as an indication in relation to the total amount of data that is to be downloaded for the particular task, although this is not always available. An example of such a progress bar is shown in FIG. 1.
Although progress bars such as those in FIG. 1 do indicate the actual progress, to completion, of an activity, such as a download, they do not indicate the quality or speed of progress. To overcome this, a numeric value is displayed on, or next to, the progress bar representing a real world number, such as actual download speed (e.g. in Kb/s). However, such a numeric value may not be a particularly good indication of how well a download is progressing, and it is questionable how useful such a number actually is to the user.
The present inventor has appreciated that it would be advantageous to provide an improved progress meter, particularly one that allows a user to instantly see the quality of the rate of progress without needing to read or understand specific measurements.